


Stitches

by inspiration_assaulted



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Maybe slash if you squint kinda hard, Quilting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-14
Updated: 2014-01-14
Packaged: 2018-01-08 18:50:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1136165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inspiration_assaulted/pseuds/inspiration_assaulted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“What on earth are you doing, John?”</p><p>John stitches things that don't bleed, for once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stitches

“What on _earth_ are you doing, John?”

John barely glanced up from his work, too intent on the details. He didn’t do this sort of thing very often, but when he did it was all-consuming.

“Surely you have eyes, Sherlock. Is that really the question you want to ask?” He grinned, looking at Sherlock’s you-have-become-too-clever-for-your-own-good-and-it-isn’t-that-I-feel-threatened-by-it-but-I-don’t-know-if-I-like-it expression (Sherlock was just that expressive sometimes.)

“Very well, allow me to rephrase. Why are you doing…that?”

“Felt like it.” John was no idiot (disregarding Sherlock’s constant comments), and he knew his vague answer wasn’t nearly satisfactory, so he explained further before his friend ended up in a strop. “My grandmother taught me whenever I’d go over to her house.” To avoid his father’s drunken rages, he didn’t add. “Sometimes the urge hits me and I have to do it, but it isn’t very often. This just happened to be one of those times.”

Sherlock sat in his chair across from John, fingers steepled beneath his chin and watched John for a moment. John ignored him, focusing on his work again.

“Those are my old shirts,” he observed after a moment. John hummed and nodded. “The ones I’ve ruined in my experiments.” John nodded again. “Why?”

“Needed the material and I didn’t feel like going to the shops. I did look them over to make sure you weren’t using them in any experiments.”

Sherlock nodded and they fell silent again.

“I didn’t know you made quilts.”

“Learn something new every day, eh?” John laughed. Sherlock waved his comment away.

“Why didn’t I know?” He sounded a bit frustrated and put out. John sighed.

“Sherlock, I haven’t done this in _years_. Since med school, probably. There wasn’t any evidence for you to observe until I started doing it again.”

Sherlock huffed and pulled out his laptop.

* * *

 

“You don’t have a pattern.”

“What’s that?”

John was quilting in the living room again, the TV tuned to a Doctor Who rerun. Bits of silk, pieces of old shirts that had been stained or chemically bleached or torn during a chase, were spread out across the couch and John’s lap as he worked.

“For your quilt. You’re not working from a pattern,” Sherlock gestured to the partially-completed piece in his hands. “You aren’t doing a geometrical pattern, nor does it match with any known quilt pattern.”

“You looked up quilt patterns, didn’t you?” John asked with a half-smile. Sherlock huffed but didn’t deny it. “It wouldn’t match anything else, since I’ve come up with the design myself. And no,” he added when Sherlock opened his mouth, “I will not tell you. In fact, I think it should be a surprise. You’ll see it when I’m done.”

Sherlock smirked, clearly confident he would be able to guess the design before John finished.

John smiled back, knowing he wouldn’t.

* * *

 

“Sherlock, why is one of your shirts on my bed?”

Sherlock shifted in his chair. John recognised his I-did-something-out-of-sentiment-but-I-don’t-want-to-admit-it-because-I-still-dislike-sentiment expression.

“I got acid on the sleeve during an experiment. I thought you might want it for your…” he gestured vaguely. “Project,” he finally settled on.

John looked at the sleeve, where the deep purple silk had turned blood red, and smiled. It was perfect.

“Thanks,” he said. Sherlock waved it away.

* * *

 

It was finally finished. Weeks of working between cases and whenever he had a free moment, and he finally held the finished product. It was definitely his best work. His stitches were neat and tidy, as perfect and even as a surgeon’s sutures. Indeed, the skill and precision his grandmother had taught him had served him well in the operating room.

The design was _inspired_. It had come to him in a flash when he looked over the pile of ruined shirts, most white or pale blue with the occasional aubergine thrown it. He was not ashamed to say he had spent hours searching through Sherlock’s forensics texts to find the right picture.

Arrayed on a background of white and pale blue squares, aubergine and red silk formed a perfect arterial spray pattern. He had backed the quilt with two bright orange shock blankets he’d found shoved in a corner of the linens closet.

Pleased with himself, John carried the quilt downstairs to show Sherlock.

* * *

 

Before he even opened his eyes, Sherlock knew he had passed out on the couch again, exhausted from four straight days on a case. The amount of light on the other side of his closed eyelids told him it was late morning. John would be at the surgery already.

Finally opening his eyes, Sherlock realized something was different. He had thought John had covered him with the afghan from his chair, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, he lay under an unfamiliar quilt that he soon recognised as the one John had been working on. The man had been right, he definitely had not guess the design correctly.

The blood spatter was perfect, a match to what one would see on a nearby wall from a victim with an upward slash wound to the neck. Sherlock marvelled at it, running his fingers over the neat seams for a moment before he noticed the quilting. The stitches formed words, backwards and barely visible on the top side. John had matched the colour of the thread to the fabric perfectly. Sherlock flipped the quilt over, running his fingers over the words picked out in tidy, even stitches, stark black against the orange shock blankets, and smiled.

I said dangerous, and here you are  
SH


End file.
